I have to laugh at the Netscape Internet Service commercials.
Maybe they figure that people will forget their past commercials or that people
are stupid.
A short time ago they charged for the Web Accelerator,
which made the price basically the same as Netzero.
Now they are advertising with the claim that Netscape is so much cheaper than
Netzero.
I guess they could not compete with Netzero for the same price,
so they had to lower the price in order to get users.
I have to wonder how long the lower price will last.
They don't really mention that they charge extra for spam control and virus
protection,
which should be automatically included as part of being an ISP.
Instead they use that as a method of getting more money out of people and
increasing the cost of their service.

This is not to say that Netzero is better than Netscape,
just that the commercials of Netscape is a bit of a joke.
On one of the Netzero web pages:
"Live telephone technical support is available for a fee of $1.95/min ($2.95
CDN/min in Canada). You are responsible for all telephone charges and any
technical support charges incurred even during any free, trial or discounted
periods."
In other words,
if you have a problem connecting, you had best get a friend to help or change
services since you could spend a fortune on a service call.
Netscape says that you get free online customer service,
which implies that using a phone is going to cost you (although I have not
found what the cost is).

Other ISPs,
like
dock.net
which have free 24 hour tech support, free spam and virus filtering and they
say that all dialups in So. Cal. are accelerated.
Perhaps they should do more advertising or maybe they don't have to try to
convince people to use their service because they have better service.

I have to wonder about the services which require you to download software,
instead of using the normal system software provided.
This can introduce additional problems,
but maybe that is good for them since you might have to call and then they get
a lot more money.
Also,
it seems that some of these services,
like Netscape,
think that the whole world is Microsoft.
Under supported operating systems is only Microsoft,
ignoring Macs and Linux systems (which are far more secure than MS products).
They also don't support better web browsers like Firefox and instead only
support IE or Netscape.

In other words,
take a look and see what else is out there as often the service is less
expensive and/or the service is much better.
If you think that you will never have to call technical support,
think back and see if you have ever had to call.
Now if the issue is a connection problem or email problem,
then how do you resolve that without calling?

Also funny is the AOL commercial where one of their customers hands her child
to an AOL employee,
uses the head of another employee to get up on the table and say what she
wants.
There is also a spoof of this for Netzero, BTW.
Is AOL trying to show that their users are rude and inconsiderate?
I know in the past AOL users were viewed not very positively,
perhaps they are just trying to keep that reputation alive.